settle (or pay) a (or the) score

And we settled a score with Steve, who beat me on the North West Stages this year, but finished 15 seconds behind us!

Each wanted to settle the score and claim that Hip-Hop Culture began and thrived on their home turf, when in fact both places probably had the same amount of youth on the street developing the culture that we know today as Hip-Hop.

‘They're a team we lost to in the first half of the season so we'd like to settle the score,’ he said.

To scotch or decisively put an end to something derives from an old use of the word for a wedge placed under a wheel to prevent it moving or slipping. Another use of scotch, ‘to make something temporarily harmless’, goes back to a line from Shakespeare's Macbeth: ‘We have scotched the snake, not killed it.’ This is not what originally appeared in Shakespeare's text, where the word first used was ‘scorched’, meaning ‘slashed with a knife’. This was an alteration of score but was short-lived, and later editors wondered what on earth burning the skin of a snake had to do with it, assuming that ‘scorched’ must be a printer's error. The origin of scotch itself is unknown, but score (Old English) comes from Old Norse ‘to make a cut or notch’. The term for twenty comes from counting by cutting notches in a piece of wood called a tally, with the word for the notch transferred to the number.